Tips

What is a Fat Funnel? Your guide to the marketing concept sweeping the B2B world

The leading B2B companies in Australia are all focusing on their fat funnels – a unique approach that is essential for any company focused on selling complex, high value products with long sales cycles.

Tips for a successful B2B Lead Nurture Strategy

If you’ve run a lead generation campaign, or have plenty of contacts that might have gone cold, or are capturing details on your website and don’t know what to do with them, an ongoing lead nurturing program is a great way to reignite the fire, move people along your funnel, and identify the keenest prospects.

Aligning your marketing with your goals

When you’re starting any marketing campaign, it’s really important to clearly define your goals first. This is the single best way to ensure you get the results you want. One of the most common mistakes we see is people getting it backwards. They start by choosing the platform or the content type, and come to us saying “We need to do Google Ads!” or “We need to improve our SEO!” without much thought behind the message or the “why”. When there’s a mis-match between your goals and the marketing platform or action you choose, you are less likely to get the results you want. What are your goals?  Instead, start with your purpose. What results do you hope to get? Look ahead to the end of the campaign – what will make it worthwhile for you? Usually it’s going to be an increase in your [...]

How are AI tools like ChatGPT changing B2B marketing?

Do we really need another article on the impacts of artificial intelligence (AI) on marketing? There’s plenty of talk out there, a lot of it probably generated by ChatGPT, but I want to take a practical and specific look at how AI is impacting business-to-business marketing, particularly in the niche and trade industries that we operate in. ChatGPT has only been around for six months, and it may not have changed the world completely, but generative AI is certainly a game-changing tool. We’ve come across some companies who are actively using it in their day-to-day operations, others dipping their toes into the water, and plenty who still aren’t actually sure what it even is. I guess I should get some definitions clear first. Artificial intelligence (AI) itself is very broad, but at its simplest, it’s about getting machines to do anything which a human mind [...]

How to maximise ROI in your B2B marketing

As a business owner or marketer, you want to ensure that your marketing efforts yield a positive return on investment (ROI). In B2B marketing, it’s especially important to be strategic and focused in order to maximise the ROI from your marketing efforts. In this blog post, we’re looking at tips to help you get the most out of your marketing efforts. Identifying your goals The first step in maximising your ROI is to identify your goals. What are you looking to achieve through your marketing efforts? Are you looking to build brand awareness, educate your audience, or generate leads? It’s important to have a clear understanding of what you want to accomplish, so that you can select the right marketing tactics and measure success accordingly. Once you’ve identified your goals, the next step is to ensure that your marketing campaign and measurement methods align with [...]

Using funnels and automation to enhance your marketing

In an increasingly competitive and unpredictable world, it’s no longer enough to rely on word-of-mouth, luck and randomness for your business growth. Instead, savvy B2B companies of all sizes are increasingly making use of tools like marketing automation to improve the reliability and predictability of their sales pipeline. Too often, less experienced companies will dabble with different elements of marketing, whether that be working with an agency that specialises in some areas, or focusing on internal pet projects. Sometimes there can be a fixation on just Google Ads, or SEO, or social media, or events – that is, a focus on just one or some parts of the funnel, rather than putting together the big picture. By mapping out their marketing and sales process, B2B companies can tweak and improve various stages, automating elements where possible and overall ensuring they can measure and improve the [...]

Top 5 ways to reach niche trade customers (apart from industry events)

Now that live events are back, business-to-business (B2B) suppliers are making the most of the opportunity to connect face to face with their customers in niche sectors like water, rail, energy, intelligent transport systems, local government and more. But what about keeping in touch between events, or reaching those key decision makers that didn’t make it to the event? Here we look at five of the best ways to do this. 1. Content Marketing B2B buyers are open to new technologies and better ways of doing things, but they are often also cautious – they need to understand the solution and, on top of that, they also like to see where else it has been used. Creating content is a great way to educate the market about your offering and increase their level of comfort and understanding. Content doesn’t just mean written content either – [...]

What is best: advertising, social media or managing your own marketing?

There are so many different places to spend your marketing budget, it can be hard to know what’s best. From advertising and magazines, to paid social media and Google Ads, to using your in-house people to create organic campaigns – which options get the best results for companies dealing in the business-to-business and business-to-government space? B2B marketing is different to consumer marketing. Everyone is pushing a different solution, so which should you choose? Some of the main pros and cons of these approaches are: Pros and cons What is clear is there is no single silver bullet for B2B marketing. The simple truth is that there are no easy answers. You need a combination. All approaches have both pros and cons, and the smartest marketers create an integrated approach that makes the most of the pros of all approaches. Goals, Audience, Content First, you need [...]

Avoiding common pitfalls with B2B lead generation

Everyone wants to generate leads right? It’s one of the most trackable forms of marketing activity, and the end result is you get actual contact details of people who want to hear from you. What’s not to love?  The benefits are obvious, and when you need to measure ROI, there are few clearer or better ways to do this than to have directly actionable leads. Lead generation is definitely a powerful and worthwhile goal in any marketing campaign, but it may not be the only goal. It’s important to understand what you can and can’t achieve with lead generation - and to make sure your approach is suited to your particular industry and niche. Are you ready? ‘Generating leads’ can often be a reflexive response to the question, ‘What do you want to achieve with your campaign?’, but it’s not always the only or best [...]

Future-proofing events for 2021 and beyond

If 2020 has proved anything, it’s that even with the most stringent planning, things can go awry. That’s why when it comes to planning events you have to be flexible, adaptable, and prepared for the unexpected. Both live events and virtual events have their benefits, but while the world is still battling the pandemic, a hybrid solution may be the best way to future-proof your events. Events have changed a lot in the past twelve months. With border closures, lockdowns, social distancing measures and visitor tracking apps becoming a normal part of life, events have had to adapt to ensure the health and wellbeing of speakers, delegates, and the wider community. Live events have been affected the most with the new changes, and virtual events have experienced a massive surge. But while some restrictions are easing and a new vaccine is on the way, ongoing [...]